Community organizer and educator Dustin Gibson discusses the white supremacist, colonial, capitalist roots of ableism which structures capitalist society, why a disability justice framework must be abolitionist, and why "the state always has a carceral response to disabled Black people."
Community organizer and educator Dustin Gibson discusses the white supremacist, colonial, capitalist roots of ableism which structures capitalist society, why a disability justice framework must be abolitionist, and why "the state always has a carceral response to disabled Black people."
Throughout the episode, you will hear the following audio clips:
Cover image: “Back of the Neck,” (1983) by Jean-Michel Basquiat
Devyn Springer:
Throughout this episode, you will hear descriptions of abuse and state violence that may be disturbing. I wanted to give this short content warning for anyone who may be triggered by these kinds of discussions. Thank you, and enjoy the episode.
Devyn:
Well, well, well. Here we are again with another episode of the Groundings podcast, I'm your host Devyn Springer. Joining me is the one, the only, the legendary Dustin Gibson, who's a friend of mine. We've been talking about doing this episode maybe three years now, if I'm being completely honest, since I started the podcast back in 2017. Dustin is an incredible community organizer, activist writer, and intellectual who is doing the crucial work of linking the conversation of state violence against ck people - specifically police violence and police brutality and prisons - with disability justice and this anti-ableist struggle in ways that I have found incredibly and profoundly educational. So I'm really excited to have this conversation with Dustin today, but before I continue, I'm going to let him go ahead and introduce himself.
Dustin Gibson:
Yeah, I appreciate that. You already know what that means to me coming from you. And I do feel like I've been a Day 1 Groundings stan. So this is really an honor to be on with you. As you said, I do disability justice work, but not only working on issues directly related to disability. I came into movement work as somebody that was disabled myself, understanding that freedom could be taken away based on what I look like, where I came from and the disabilities that I have. So that was the point I'd say I was radicalized and then introduced to the theories and ideas of what independent living was. I guess, the radical arm of what the disability rights movement did. And talking about disabled people as people being the experts of our own lives and being able to lead - whether that's our own organizations, our own care, or our own lives. And then from there I started to do more carceral work in work around policing. And I think we'll get into that, but, just broadly I do disability justice work, specifically in sites of harm, whether that's marginalized neighborhoods and communities or carceral spaces like psych wards, prisons, state institutions, asylums and nursing facilities.
Devyn:
And I like that you said you're a Day 1 Groundings fan because you were one of the first people I told about the podcast before it was out, when you were in Atlanta, I told you about the podcast. And that was actually when we first talked about having you on was, was a few days before I actually released it. I don't know if you remember that. I think it's also important to tell the story of our first engagement online. The first time I met you through Twitter, I was tweeting about the case of Anthony Hill in Atlanta, who was shot and killed by the DeKalb police. I was writing, doing a lot of work and organizing around that. And I kept on referring to Anthony as someone "suffering" from mental illness. And you checked me, and told me how that language is actually ableist and how I could correct it. While I was initially sort of embarrassed, and didn't fully understand the weight of that corrective process, I learned to deeply appreciate it. And that was how I came to know you.
Dustin:
Yeah. That's one of the things that I still struggle with today. What does it mean for us to use accurate language? To be able to describe our experiences? With disability justice I feel like it grounds me in that a lot of the times. I heard an elder, Dr. Kim Richards from Louisiana, say, "sticks and stones break our bones, but words shape our reality." And I think about that language. Like "suffering" from some type of disability, is often projected onto disabled people, but by using other words than suffering, it changes the frame of how we think about it. Also, another interesting thing about Atlanta is that when I was down there - I think that may have been four years ago - I was a part of this group that was getting set up at the time, to build a collective between disabled people and folks that were fighting for racial justice, specifically around Anthony's case. And that group has now come together. They're called "Us Protecting Us," and I've been working on and off with them for four years. And this weekend will be the first time they put out a workshop to the public for crisis intervention without police. So it feels like a lot of the stars are aligned in this moment, knowing that that work was a four year process.
Devyn:
It's incredible how eye-opening the link between police or state violence and disability can be. The idea of having an analysis around disability was very foreign to me until I was able to make the connection to this kind of violence. Even as someone who has mental illness and disabilities and whatnot, I wasn't able to make that connection on my own. It took someone like you, and it took reading the analyses that came out around the Anthony Hill case to really understand the connections that are there. And I was wondering, just to sort of ground this conversation as we begin, if you could give me your definition of ableism. Because I think as the term becomes more "mainstream," different definitions are arising. I think that some of them are less helpful than others, some of them are useful, and I'm just curious how you define it. That way we can ground this conversation in that.
Dustin:
I think that the majority of people will view ableism as discrimination based on someone having a disability, right? If it's radical, they'll say the oppression of people with disabilities. One of the things that we recognize is that [both definitions] draw from a rights-based framework, of talking about anti-discrimination right, or just generally saying oppression and not necessarily naming where that's coming from or what it is. So for the past few years we've been working on a definition where ableism is more accurately described. Not only describing the experience disabled people have because of ableism, but also how it harms society at large. And I've been working on that, primarily led by Talila Lewis, who just goes by TL. Our definition is somewhat complex, but it talks about how ableism is rooted in anti-Blackness, eugenics, colonialism, capitalism. It is assigning value or worthiness to people based on how they behave, how they excel, how they produce or reproduce. Also, one of the important things to come out of that is the idea that you do not have to be disabled to experience ableism. We think about ableism as something dictating who can reproduce and who can produce. And how the state has taken away the ability for many women to reproduce, for myriad of different reasons. But that in itself is an ableist action. So it is part and parcel of all of the struggles that we have. And it is a core feature of everything, right? Like with racism, we might have different derivations of it, like anti-Black racism. But with ableism, there's no such thing as anti-Black ableism, because ableism is inherently anti-Black.
Devyn:
That's a very powerful way to look at it. And the reason I mentioned this mainstreaming of the term is because right now social justice is going mainstream in a way, right. And we can get into this later maybe, but I have seen several definitions of "ableism" as "disability" floating online, that make the phenomenon a very individual occurrence, not something that is structural, that's rooted in these colonial and racist origins. And I think that your distinctions hit on something very important. You mentioned eugenics, anti-Black racism, capitalism, colonialism. So I'm wondering if you have been in conversation with other people who do work similar to yours about this mainstreaming of ableism in the same way that I've been in conversation with a lot of abolitionists who now discussing tactics to combat the mainstreaming and flattening of the word abolition, which is what we're seeing as these protests continue.
Dustin:
One, I think people have kind of been thinking about ableism for a while now. And when I say "a while," I'm just talking about a few decades. But it feels more so that the mainstreaming of disability justice is happening and definitions of ableism might come out in those conversations. And I do worry about that. In the same way that "restorative justice" was co-opted, and now lives within prisons and schools - places that it actually can't live if it's being true to its roots. And how "transformative justice" is also another model that can't be scaled. With disability justice, we see those same things happening. We see think-tanks and "liberal, progressive organizations" having entire "disability justice initiatives." We see people that are disabled become highly visible or popular being labeled as people that do "disability justice work." And through all of that, it really gets watered down and it loses what it is actually grounded in: Principles of being anti-capitalist, principles of being abolitionist, and something that's developed by indigenous, Black, queer and trans folks. So it is losing all of the entry points that we have, if that makes sense.
Devyn:
I think it makes perfect sense. And it's a reminder that the hegemonic powers, the capitalist powers, can and will attempt to co-opt whatever they can. Whatever they deem threatening, they will try and redirect. And the fact that you can observe something similar happening in this disability justice conversation means that it is a conversation that threatens existing power structures. It's a threatening movement, of what I call positive threats. You know, it's the good kind of threatening, because it threatens power.
[Breaks to interlude featuring live audio from disability justice activist Leroy Moore Jr., who discusses being Black and disabled and the erasure of Emmett Til's disability.
Question from the Crowd:
Hi, my name is Susie. I am a teacher educator, and when you put up the slide that said that Emmett Till had a disability that blew my mind, I had no idea and I've taught his story. And so I Googled it real quick to find out. I would love to hear you talk about his story a little bit and why you think the fact of his disability is so commonly erased from any telling of his story. I'd really like to hear you talk about that.
Leroy Moore Jr.:
Telling the whole story would take more time but yeah, his story is this. A lot of people in the Black disabled community know about this story, but the story about Emmet Till is that he had polio. So he used to stare a lot. And his mom taught him the whistle to keep his starting down. And that whistle was the reason why he got lynched, because he whistled at a white lady. So that's part of disability history and Black disability history. But a lot of Black scholars don't include that. Matter of fact, I was at The Whitney Museum and I had a chance to perform there. And this was after they had this whole uprising about the Emmett Till exhibit. And although I was for the protest against having a Caucasian woman do an Emmett Till exhibit, once again, the concept of disability wasn't even there even in that exhibit. So it's about bringing up these stories constantly, especially in these museums. Because these museums get thousands and millions of dollars to build, and they're not including the disability story. The lynchings in Alabama were featured in a story on Oprah and they're talking about this museum, but not one thing about disability. It's unbelievable.
Question from the Crowd:
So as you're talking folks identities being erased, and you also talk about how important it is for us to know who our ancestors were as full people. Like as a part of the Harriet Tubman collective, some of the things that we identified as having a place to exist as a whole person. So you talk about Emmett Till's disability being erased, or Harriet Tubman's. I want to know, what toll does that take on you? As somebody that lives at those intersections of being Black and also being disabled, and knowing that when you're fighting for racial justice you always have to be the person to put disability into it. And then also in the typical disability rights movement, you're probably the person inserting racial justice into that. So as like a Black disabled person in body and mind, what toll does that take on you?
Leroy:
Thank you for saying that. Yeah, these things take a heavy, heavy toll on me. To always have that push back from our communities and from really like, Black scholars. It's unbelievable how much it takes from me. But also, these stories make me energized. [...] Having the opportunity to do a children's book, you know. So it's like, little steps like that keep me going. Having you out there, Justin, doing your work. Because back in the 80s, I swear, I felt like I was the only Black disabled person talking about police brutality. So now I see that you're out there, and TL is out there doing their stuff, so there is progress. I do this presentation because I'm like "guys, it's so dark, but there is progress being made today. So that's what keeps me going. Now my niece and nephews know about disability. My niece is transgender little girl. And when she was 5 I used to pick her up from school, and one time she looked at me and says, "Uncle I hate police because they mess with you." It's like, wow. My niece is an advocate for me, at age 5. If she can see it, Black professors with PhDs can see it. So that's what keeps me going.
[Audio interlude ends, returns to interview between Dustin Gibson and Devyn Springer]
Devyn:
So I guess I want to get into your work a little bit. And one of the common threads in your work that I've noticed is entangling the notion of racism, specifically anti-Black racism, with disability justice and disability politics. You almost make them inseparable in your analysis. Can you explain that a little?
Dustin:
Yeah. I often think about slavery and how some of the understandings of disability we have now came out of that period. I think about how race and disability were pathologized through legal courses of action. So I'm thinking about like the 1840 Census counting, for the first time, people by their racial designation as well as disability. And that Census says that the majority of free Black people were "insane" and "idiotic," to use their language, while saying that the majority of people that were still enslaved were sane. So it's creating this idea that to be free and Black, and to have the urge to want to be free and Black, is deemed to be a mental illness. So we see it in specific things like "drapetomania" or "rascality." Drapetomania being the overwhelming urge to run away, right? So running away from a plantation can get you put into an asylum. And at that asylum, your "treatment" would be bathwater, sunlight, and hard labor. So you would quite literally be doing the same thing that you were doing on a plantation, but you're at a place called the asylum. And back to the language thing. When we think of asylum, we think of a place of refuge, a place of escapism. But this is using that language, under this guise that they're providing some type of treatment and safety for people, to create another prison, another institution, another type of carceral space. And we see that all across history and in present day, with how we label the places that we disappear disabled people too. A lot of places are called "state schools," where you have 2 or 3 thousand disabled people literally being held in chicken wire cages and coops, chained to walls, beds and radiators. We also refer to them as "state hospitals" and "state centers." So there's those connections that happen. There's also connections on a different level, regarding how we're socialized to think about certain things. We think about "normal" as this white supremacist standard of a person's body and mind. We think about intelligence as something that derives from our ability to quote shit, remember things, or obtain this certain amount of knowledge. But for Black folks and for indigenous folks, it was illegal to read for however long. It was punishable by death. And then we built an entire education system predicated on our ability to read. So there's a bunch of connections between literacy rates in prisons and the people that occupy them. But also with disabled people, we are gauging people's value and their worth based off of their IQ score, or their ability to read. And that comes out in today's system. One, by thinking people are not intelligent and erasing any other type of metric of intelligence - spiritual, intrinsic intelligence, generational intelligence, all of those things. But we're also stripping people's rights away. If your IQ is less than a certain amount, then you could have your guardianship taken away from you, somebody can control your money and control where you live. So those two things can't be disentangled. If we're thinking Black people are less intelligent, if we're thinking indigenous people are savages. And then we're also thinking about disabled people that are scoring the same [low scores] possibly for different reasons, as a part of that category, that puts us all in it together, metaphorically.
Devyn:
You said in the beginning that one of your grounding principles is anti-capitalism. And I'm thinking about what you're saying right now, as it relates to literacy, intelligence, schooling, and how they're entangled with slavery and ableism. And it makes me think of the Cuban Revolution. In repealing and getting rid of capitalism and establishing the socialist state, two things were, sort of, some of the first and most successful initiatives. The first was that they created what they called rural medical services. They essentially wanted to put clinics or what would be called poly clinics in every single neighborhood across the island. Because they realized that rural communities, Black communities and impoverished communities had almost no medical care whatsoever, and medical care was tied to this plantation model. The second thing they did was have mass literacy and educational programs, because they realized that the rates of illiteracy, including adult illiteracy, were so high. They understood that part of lifting everyone up was this idea of literacy, because in the way that society had been established, literacy often determined one's rate of engagement in higher education, jobs and even social interaction. Now Cuba has one of the highest literacy rates in the world. It's actually higher than the U.S. And I'm also thinking about a cousin of mine who used to work at an adult learning community center. This was in rural Georgia. And she would always talk about how there's so many adults who are illiterate in the U.S., but people have this fantasy idea that that's a problem that is not happening in the U.S., or that happens only in other countries. And it also sort of brings into this question now, when you add that layer of this imperialist propaganda and thinking around disability too, and how even these local issues of disability and ableism are seen through a veneer of imperialist propaganda sometimes. The mythmaking of the U.S. is inherently ableist. But another thing you touched on is asylums and prisons. And you have this term that I've seen recur in your work that's called carceral ableism. Upon first interacting with this term, I found it interesting and useful, and I was wondering if you could break that down a bit.
Dustin:
I do want to say something real quick about what you were just saying. Even the idea of organizing the society around literacy or people's ability to speak is ableist. Like it is prioritizing both the English language (or any type of colonial language) and the spoken language, spoken in a specific way. And we should think about how Black people and disabled people, and then people that are Black and disabled, are marginalized through that process. Like the dialect in which my family speaks, right? Coming from Mississippi, and then to Kinloch, St. Louis, and then to Wyoming. Knowing that we don't have a reporter voice from Indiana or language that we're using. And then to know that not everybody is verbal as well, whether that's temporary or permanent. Folks use other modes of communication. So just some of the ways that we inherently operate as a society and how we're organized, just excludes people in a myriad of ways.
Devyn:
It's interesting. You talk about literacy and structuring society around that. And I'm wondering ... because the way I see it is illiteracy. And I think of this term illiteracy, not in the most literal terms of, can you read your country's language or not, but I think of it in terms of, for example, the fact that the majority of people in the U.S. don't know how to speak American sign language, or don't know how to communicate with maybe someone who has vision impairments. So, I mean, there's a multitude of ways "illiteracy" can be interpreted. And I want to get your opinion on this, because to me, the way that socialist countries have spent a lot of time working to do these sort of popular education, mass literacy programs is wonderful. And it's a good thing, because with the historical exclusion, that has gone on for decades, usually centuries, related to the ways that colonialism and slavery, disallowed certain individuals, specifically Black and colonized people, to engage in reading and writing, I see it as a good thing. But I also understand that these processes in themselves can recreate ableist exclusion, if I could get your opinion on that.
Dustin:
Yeah. So 1, I'm pro reading. That's one thing I should say. But another is that when I'm thinking about literacy, yes, for myself, I'm defining it in a lot of different ways. But I think it's important to name how society at large is defining it - as the ability to read and write. So when I'm talking about organizing society around literacy, I'm using that definition, and saying that's inherently ableist. But this is also another thing that disability justice affords us. It allows us to think about other modes of communication. It's not just reading and writing. What are we actually trying to get at? Are we getting at comprehension for the sake of being able to mobilize and unify? Are we getting at comprehension for the ability to get through the educational system or get a job and have a nine to five? So I think the goal changes how I view literacy, but the one thing that remains, with thinking about disability justice and thinking about access centered approaches, it allows us to get outside of just having to read books, right? It acknowledges what we learned from just speaking with people and acknowledges is how we learn from being in the presence of whether our elders, our family and our community. It forces us to think about sign language as a mode of communication or what it means when we don't look people in the eye. There's all of these things that come from it, when we get outside of the idea that reading and writing is the only way to gain knowledge. And they just like on a baseline level: Not everybody, whether or not there are incredible educational systems, can read and write. So there will always be people that can't do that. So I'm thinking about those folks.
Devyn:
I think that's a that's a wonderful distinction to make. And I hope listeners can really sit and ruminate on that. I don't know if I used the word ruminate correctly, but it was my "word of the day" last week and I didn't use it, so now I'm trying to sneak it in and play catch up. But the work of framing and forming a politic and analysis around disability justice forces us to think about processes of exclusion. And this is something that I think may be foreign to a lot of people, because we think of the world in terms of oppression, structural racism, denial, and appropriation. We have all these terms, but the actual process of exclusion - how excluded classes of people and excluded groups of people get created through the larger structures of colonialism, slavery, white supremacy, patriarchy - slips us. And part of this goes back to the language conversation we actually started with. I think that this corrective approach to language and getting people to understand the framing of language can do part of the work because just by framing your language in a certain way, it shows power dynamics.
Dustin:
I think a lot about how we just refer to disabled people. And I say that as somebody that did not always understand the political and social implications of having a disability. I came into a movement that was heavily led by white folks, and organized around issues that impacted white disabled people. And with that, there was this sense of preserving or announcing our humanity to the world and using person first language to do so. So putting people before our disabilities. And I mean, there's a lot of traits of whiteness. There's a lot of reasons that whiteness would want us to do that. So to think about how I define myself now as disabled, that's a political designation. It's also one that is social, that is tying me to a culture of people, a community. And to know that my identity is politicized creates a different entry point. To think about disabled people as disabled, rather than solely just people that have disabilities. Like I don't carry my disabilities in a purse with me. It's a part of my identity in the same way that my Blackness is. But there's the separation that happens when we're thinking about disability, this white centric concept. A political understanding of it is a more radical approach.
Devyn:
The distinction between an identity of "disabled" as sort of a political category versus a "person with disabilities" also gets into the idea of who gets to be a human or a citizen. Because the politics of recognition are raced differently for different groups. They look different for different groups. And I think that the language, the shift in calling oneself disabled as a political category actually allows access to this discourse for way many more people. Because many individuals are not viewed as people by the state. I'm thinking of Black people, undocumented people, trans people, etc. So that's very interesting. I've never thought of it like that. And one of the things that I credit you for having me think about is the distinction that people put between mental physical health and mental and physical illness, and the really binary way of thinking about these two things. Speaking personally, the impact of my own mental illness is physical. And the manifestations of that mental illness or mental health is physical. I think of my anxiety, and what it results in is anxiety, attacks, shakes, panic attacks, difficulty breathing. But also exclusion from certain social events, exclusion from group settings. So it's a very material and physical manifestation of the mental. And I'm wondering if you could give me your thoughts on this distinction and where it plays into the larger conversation. Because I think right now we are seeing a slight collapse between the two stations, which I view as positive.
Dustin:
Yeah. I think that this is one of those concepts or understandings that I just intrinsically knew for a long time before I had the language for it. It was very clear to me, as somebody that had been diagnosed with a mental illness, taken to the psych ward, and cuffed and taken by officers there. I didn't have the ability to leave or talk to people. Like all of those things were a very physical response to something that was, purportedly, only happening within my mind. So that connection for me was clear when I developed language for it was when I started to read the work of people like Leroy Moore and Patty Byrne and think about not separating the body mind. Like even as we write it on paper, right? Like I don't separate. I don't say "body and mind." It's just body mind. If we're going to have to use that binary, then we're going to use it together to create no separation. And like you said, it like comes out in a very physical way. I'm thinking about Natasha McKenna. Earlier we were talking about drapetomania and some of the ways in which disabilities were constructed and created in order to control Black bodies. Right? And Natasha McKenna is somebody that had a diagnoses of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. People called the cops on her because she wasn't behaving in a way that people are purportedly supposed to in public. And then that leads down this path of incarceration and police intervention, and her ultimately being murdered in a jail in Virginia.
[Audio interlude #2: Members of Fairfax County, Virginia, at a public forum following the killing of Natasha McKenna]
Erica Totten:
So what I am bringing to you and to the attention of everybody, is that if you all have not read the Casual Killing Act of 1705 from Virginia, you need to read this. Because this is what we are experiencing today. And it's not just in Virginia. It is everywhere. And it reads: "And if any slave resist his master or owner or other person by his or her order, her sheriff correcting such slave and shall happen to be killed in such correction, it shall not be a counted felony. It shall not be a counted felony. But the master owner and every such other person so giving correction shall be free and acquit of all punishment and accusation for the same as if such incident had never happened." This is what we're dealing with today. This Casual Killing Act of 1705 from this state is specifically showing up in this case for Natasha McKenna. Her murder was ruled an accident, as if it never happened. That is a problem for me as a Black woman in this country, because Natasha McKenna is me. She is all of us. And to say that her death is an accident and is an "oops," that you just learn from, I have a problem with that. And when I have a problem with something, especially when we're talking about systems of oppression, I dismantle that shit. And we all dismantle that. So reports and tears are not enough. They have never been enough. Ray Monroe (???) said that he teared up when he watched this video, and yet did not file charges. That's a problem for me. White tears are not enough. They don't save us. They don't. And I want to ask everyone on this panel and you could raise your hand if you watch the video of what happened to Natasha McKenna. So this is the thing. In watching that you have to look at that and know that there is no justice here. What they did to her is torture. They had a bag over her head. They tased her four times. This woman was having a psychotic episode. She didn't know what was happening to her. She had men in white suits, groping at her naked body, and she wanted to leave. And they kept saying, "we're your friend." Look at how sadistic that sounds. That is a problem. So when her mother sees her in a hospital bed with her eyes swollen shut, and bruises all over her body and a missing finger, that is a problem. You have to be able to see that this is not enough. It's not enough. It is not enough. So do something. The problem with these reports is that there is no justice. These reports are given the opportunities to aggressors, to the aggressors, to share their version of events, often fabricating stories, blaming the victims for their deaths. Every time, a display of the insidiousness of white supremacy and systemic racism within the Sheriff's department and police departments across this country. And this report, these deputies described Natasha McKenna as an animal. And I quote, "She growled. She looked demonically possessed and she showed super human strength." So it is condescending to imply that we don't read. That's a part of systemic oppression. That's the ideas that people have about Black people. We read these reports, don't try it. It's condescending. What I have yet to hear is consequences for the police that killed people. Attorney Monroe (???) said that he teared up when he watched the video and yet failed to bring charges for her murder. And instead ruled it an accident and put out a 52 page report on why it was Natasha's fault that they killed her. Or in the minds of many who don't see Black people as human, why they had to put her down. She was shackled a bad place over her head. She was tased four times at 50,000 volts. She was fighting, she was scared. They terrorized her for days. They terrorized her for days. They terrorized her for days. And that is a problem.
Asantewaa Nkrumah Ture:
My name is Asantewaa Nkrumah Ture but tonight my name is Natasha McKenna. I think you can pronounce that name. Natasha McKenna was needlessly killed. Why was she tased four times while her hands and feet were bound? Surely the officer that tased her to death had to know the effect of that much current going through her body that many times. Where was all his training? And better yet, where was his humanity? People all over the world in Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, Africa have seen that horrific video, showing a mentally ill young Black woman treated in such a brutal manner. These same people asked me, is the United States really that violent? Racism and sexism and hatred toward the mentally ill - does it look like that in America? This is what people ask me. They also asked me, do they still fly the Confederate flag in that state called Virginia? Natasha McKenna was clearly frightened with several men, dressed in hazmat suits, looking like monsters from a 1950s horror show, hurting her. She was afraid for her life. And I would be too. During that whole ordeal, she was naked. If you say you saw that video, you saw what happened to her and she was naked. Does that bother your conscious any, a little bit? So no one cared that no one cared about her dignity or even their own. It was a cruel reminder of how African slaves were treated once upon a time. So for all those that contributed to the senseless death of Natasha McKenna, they are guilty of a crime. They must be held accountable and they should be punished to the fullest extent of any law that is still left in this country. Anything less is a crime against not only her humanity, but the humanity of all of us. And lastly about all these commissions and committees and so on and so forth. That deal with policing? If you're really serious, looking at this panel, you need to include more people of color. You need to include more immigrants. You need to include people who are homeless and their organizations. You need to include people who are mentally ill and their organizations. All other marginalized people need to be included on these commissions and committees. Otherwise you're wasting our time and the taxpayer's money. Thank you.
[Audio interlude #2 ends and it returns to Dustin Gibson and Devyn Springer]
Dustin:
...And to know that that begins with somebody's mental state, right. And how our response to that is then a physical one, oftentimes violent from the state. But in thinking about how do we respond to disability and I'm to try to circle this around, but it's very hard to think about this in a linear way, especially with timelines. To think about slaves as people that were deemed to be sound or not found. And if you were sound, that meant that you had the ability to go and produce for yourself on a plantation. And what that means today, the physical response to that would be treatment, right? Like treatment conflated with punishment. So that is to have devils whipped out of you. To have bath water, sunlight, hard labor. To have all of these things physically happening to you something they view as mental. So now when we don't separate the physical from mental, our response to it has to be different. It has to be a holistic response. Hopefully that makes sense. That's kind of how I'm thinking about it in this moment.
Devyn:
I think that makes perfect sense. And you said something that really stuck out to me, I mean, you mentioned your own personal experience of being forced into treatment, right? But that is a physical force and both the state and interpersonally the response to mental illness, not just sort of the person experiencing it, but the actual state and interpersonal response is almost always very physical. We can't think of it in purely psychological terms. If the actual response is physical, in typically violent ways, thinking about the way that disabilities can make people predisposed for even more injury when they come in contact with the state. I think of myself having severe asthma and knowing that any interaction with the police where there's any weight on me or on my chest, or my breathing is restricted at all, I have about 25 seconds before I'm dead. You know what I mean? And that's very real. And asthma, as it impacts majority Black and working class people, is something that we have to begin to look at, that there is a very physical and material analysis to be had. And when we talk about the mental, the physical, I like how you say the body mind - I actually like that. I think I'm going to adopt that language - and you might have more updated numbers, but the numbers I saw from 2016 said that around 40 to 45% of all incarcerated people have a form of mental illness. And essentially U.S. prisons and jails are the biggest therapists because we have such a horrible healthcare system and we're a carceral state. And I think that some 50% of people who experience police violence in the U.S. also have some form of disability, which is both physical and/or mental. And this gets us to this idea of a carceral ableism. And this is a term and an idea that I think you have spent some time developing, and I find it very useful. And in collapsing that divide between the physical and the mental, you actually can have a very generative analysis of carceral ableism, but I'm going to actually let you maybe explain that a little bit more.
Dustin:
Yeah. And I mean, one important thing that you just lifted is the fact that Black people are disproportionately impacted by certain health conditions, certain disabilities. And that's another one of the reasons that it's important to tie ableism to this capitalist framework. To think about the geographical location of a lot of Black neighborhoods being situated next to or on top of toxic lands. Toxic, stolen lands at that. Places where there's fluoride in the water. All of these things that could add to low air quality and in turn have an entire community impacted with respiratory conditions. One of the ways in which that gets erased is through how we define disability. Because we're defining disability as some physical or mental impairment that limits a major life function, taking it straight from The Rehab Act of 1973 or The Americans With Disabilities Act, which uses the same language, we're both conceding that disability is an impairment and not thinking about how our environment actually forces us as people to interact with it. So we interact with it on a human level, as people that develop these things. We develop asthma, right? It's not always something that people are born with. So that's just like one important way to think about disability as this thing that has been erased in marginalized people for a long time. I often think about Palestine when I think about this, knowing that there's a place in which people are occupied place, where there's extreme violence, where people are being sniped and killed by the IDF, to point where we don't even have enough prosthetics to keep up with the amount of people losing limbs. And a lot of that has to do with the sanctions and materials that are able to go in and out of Palestine. But one of the things I think about is our understanding of what it is to have PTSD or see PTSD in the U.S. We have entire studies that show us 85%, 90% of the children in places like Compton or North Philly would qualify for disability-related services at the school because of the trauma that they've experienced. But when we think about it in a global perspective, the numbers from Palestine are very low, as far as who is disabled and who is not. Or who has disabilities and who lives with trauma. And that's not even incorporating like the physical aspect of, you know, being under siege and having that as well. So I say that to say that our numbers across all communities - Within indigenous and Black communities in the U.S., we have disproportionate rates of disability, higher rates. But it is still like very low 30 to 25%. But we'll also have entire communities that do have asthma, that do have the PTSD. That have four prescription medications per person in a neighborhood that's 3,000 people. But it'll still tell us that only 30% are disabled. So I think a few things are happening. One, like our definition of disability is like very confined and constrained with specific status. And two, it is not incorporating the experiences of people that are not white. It's not incorporating how marginalized communities develop disability and what vacuum that we're in, that is a perpetuating disability. Which I think happens with trauma, happens with poverty and happens with violence. And all of those things coming together. And violence being defined very broadly - People, food, apartheid, all of those things.
Devyn:
I like that you mentioned Palestine, because two years ago, the Palestinian ministry of mental health actually said that the Western conception of PTSD and mental illness fail Palestine. Because with PTSD, there's an inscription of the word post, right? That you have gone through a traumatic period and you're over it, you're on the other side of it. She said that they they're never post the trauma, the traumatic experience. She said that the people who she treats and what she sees in the streets are not representative of someone facing a onetime traumatic event. Like being attacked by a dog and then having that traumatic event scar the rest of their lives. It's people for whom it's chronic, it's daily, and it's a lived experience that's essentially inescapable. And I also think a lot about the Congo, during the colonial period in the Congo. If African people didn't harvest enough rubber and enough of what the plantation owners wanted them to, they would chop off their limbs as punishment. And for a long period, the Congo actually had the highest number of people with amputated limbs in the world. And that is one of the most direct examples to me, both Palestine and the Congo, of the ways that this racist, colonial violence is entangled with disability, in ways that we can understand disability as both a constructed reality or forced reality, as well as an intrinsic reality. And I love that you connected it to Black communities facing higher rates of asthma and high blood pressure. We can even get into that if you want. A number of things. I recently saw a study that Black people in the U.S. Have some of the blood pressure of anyone in the world. And when African migrants come here, their blood pressures are lower, but within five to 10 years, they mirror African-American blood pressure rates. I mean, that's, that is very wild to really think about and break down what that means within disability politics.
Dustin:
The way you talk about Congo and Palestine, and it being so entrenched to the experience, that's like oftentimes how I think about Black people in the U.S. There's a lot of valid reasons in which we wouldn't subscribe to the labels of disability. We wouldn't say we're mentally ill or have developmental or intellectual disabilities because of what could happen from us to us. And what has happened and what continues to happen. Like even in the conversations that are happening now, as disability enters public discourse around state violence. Like we're talking about like "raising awareness," and things that, quite frankly, don't work. Like mental health awareness has not worked at all. But for Black people, it puts us in a specific type of dangerous situation to be, have these labels subscribed to us. Because then we could be put into prisons, then we could be put into institutions. But I also think that disability is something that's so intrinsic to the Black experience that we don't label ourselves, as disabled people, because we view it to be a part of what it is to be Black. Like one of the ways I think about this is through hip hop, through music, knowing that disability has always been a part of the way in which musicians and artists have talked about the world, but would never just even use the word disability. People like, I mean, very problematic at this point, but people like Boosie, right? Somebody that spent time in Angola, somebody that had diabetes prior to going there, right. And then knowing what the food selection at prisons are. And then knowing that Angola is this plantation. Like we used to say, for traditional institutions for disabled people, that if it has a water tower, that means it's an institution. That has since transformed into, if you can't go and get a burrito at 3:00 AM, then you're in an institution, regardless of whether it looks like a house or an apartment. But at a place like Angola, that is a plantation model, where the food is being created there and taken from the land and where water is situated between 13 nuclear waste sites, and people develop disability as super high rates. And that is what connects it to communities. When I'm thinking about that, I'm thinking of Braddock, Pennsylvania, right outside of Pittsburgh, where the air quality is super low and they're also trying to institute fracking into the neighborhood. And how those connections not only create disablement, but perpetuate and exacerbate disability. So Boosie, being somebody that spent time in Angola, and developed cancer, like a lot of people do in prison, but would never say he's disabled, would never talk about disability but absolutely has a song called "Fuck Cancer." And that is a part of how we erased disability, whether it's intentional or unintentional, from our histories. Like people like Jacob Lord, somebody that literally made an entire series about being in a psych ward. But we would never say he's a "disabled painter." So that's some of the things that I'm thinking about when you lift it being so intrinsic to our experience.
Devyn:
I think about the song, "I Can't Go On This Way" by Beanie Sigel, one of my favorite rappers. He is describing depression. Would he ever say that he was depressed? And as you said, would he ever say he was disabled? Probably not, but you can't listen to that song, without seeing that he's he's describing very specific ways that structures of oppression have made him feel like he cannot go on this way any longer. Or I think of Nicki Minaj and her song "All Things Go," where she talks about her cousin being shot and killed, making her wants to pop pills and dissociate and just give up on life and harm herself. And I think these are like very tangible examples. And I think to bring music into it is very powerful. And I want to make sure listeners understand when you say Angola, you're speaking about the prison, not the country, of course.
Devyn:
And we can also make this connection to places like Iraq or Yemen, where U.S. and Western imperialism has also created the conditions to both perpetuate and create disability, disablement. When I think of places like the DPRK, or North Korea, where the U.S. actually slaughtered 80% of the country and 80% of all standing buildings, I think of what those dust clouds, when inhaled, do for people. I think of the longterm effects of that has on people. So there's a real connection between the prison in the U.S., as the site that is usually on or around waste, including nuclear waste, military waste, or next to military bases with jet fuel flying over them every day, with horrible water, horrible food. These are conditions that are created. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore would say, these are conditions that don't have to be this way, but they're chosen to be this way. And connecting that to this international violence that the U.S. has brought onto other people, I think making that connection is very important.
Dustin:
Yeah. And one of the things that is always present for me is this idea that like Black people don't talk about mental health. We don't talk about. And I think it does a disservice to us as a people. One, if we did talk about these things, I don't think we would have survived in the U.S. We have ways in which we talk about them. And very complex ways too. Like, back to the music. Pac talks about, "I wake up in the morning and I ask myself, is life worth living? Should I blast myself? I'm tired of being poor and even worse, I'm Black. My stomach hurts so I'm looking for a purse to snatch." And then he goes on to talk about state violence, right. But he's acknowledging the fact that he's feeling this way. And it's being exacerbated by capitalism, by anti-Blackness and by state violence. And I think that's a nuanced understanding to have of our position within society. And I don't think that it's necessarily important for us to adopt Western language, to talk about disability Which seems to be the push, when we talk about mental health awareness or disability awareness. It's wanting Black people to talk about it in the ways that white people do. But white people don't experience it how we do. And that is something that is ever present. And I mean, I learned that primarily from being in sites of confinement, like nursing facilities, prisons, jails, institutions, psych wards, group homes. I mean, there's so many of them that are connected and serving similar purposes.
Devyn:
This idea is almost like a decolonial link to the conversation, right? Where we can understand that if, if in Palestine, this Western concept of PTSD is failing them. And in the U.S. our very language we use to talk about disability is failing Black people. And it's all because this is really rooted in the colonial health system that we have. I think that shows right there, there's a decolonial link to it. I also think about the creative ways that Black people will talk about disability without talking about it. Even something that seems so subtle. I think a lot about the rappers who repetitively, on almost every song, they have an ad lib, where they're just coughing on the track. That may seem silly, and I know usually it's related to like drugs and stuff like that, but when you really think about it, that's a trend amongst multiple rappers. This idea that there is a cough at the beginning or in the middle of the track. Especially with people Lil Wayne, you know what I mean? But this is the way that invisibility is rendered visible, but in ways that speaks to our language as Black people. And I'm curious if you have any ideas yourself on why it's so difficult to discuss disability in the Black community. And why it is so lacking from the communal conversation.
Dustin:
One, I do want to acknowledge that ableism exists in Black communities, as it does in other places. I think the reasons for it are really different. As stated before, there's always been a carceral response to disabled Black people and how we navigate the world. So that's one of them, but I think that it's much more that there's barriers to discussing it when using Western language and thinking about disability as a white-centric concept. And that's where the barriers are. I think that we discuss disability all the time, quite frankly. I think that we do talk about diabetes and blood sugar. And yeah, we talk about them, but we just don't use that same language. I think those were the barriers exist. Now, as far as talking about people's intellectual and developmental disabilities, a lot of us have adopted the ways in which the state refers to people, which the state thinks about people, but it's been marketed to us that way as well. So I think it's important to name these sources. There's a place in Boston, Massachusetts or Canton called Judge Rotenberg Center that has been using what they refer to as electroshock therapy on both kids and adults. So it's quite literally people with backpacks on being shot with electricity in order to behave and be disciplined. But here's how they market it. Because it is a majority Black and brown kids, they go to New York, they go to Brooklyn, they go to Queens, they advertise a hot 97, and they bring basketballs to the family. They talk about how there's this place that could help your children out, because the New York public school system is failing you. So the New York public school district is paying for their kids to be sent away to this institution where they're experiencing torture, really.
[Audio interlude #3: Jennifer Msumba discusses her time at the Judge Rotenberg Center (mentioned previously by Dustin), where she experienced torture and abuse which included shock therapy.]
Interviewer:
How many times a day do you think you were shocked?
Jennifer Msumba:
In the beginning I was shocked every day. And then it got less and less, but then there would be times where I would have a bad day and get it a lot. Or when they started putting me on the board and shocking me, I'd get five or ten shocks for just doing one thing.
Interviewer:
What was that like?
Jennifer:
That was like being underground in hell.
Interviewer:
Can you describe it for me? I mean, people have seen that video of the one young man who was shocked like thirty times.
Jennifer:
It's so scary that, that you don't even feel like it's real life anymore. You just feel like you're floating. I just would make myself try to float because it's so scary. I would ask God to make my heart stop, because I didn't want to live when that was happening to me. I just wanted to die and make a stop.
Interviewer:
So you would ask God to make your heart stop, just to end it.
Jennifer:
Because my heart was beating so fast and I was sweating. My heart was beating. I thought my heart will stop and they won't be able to hurt me anymore. One day they, they came to me and said that from now on if you do certain things instead of getting shocked once you're going to go on the four point board and you're going to get shocked five times over ten minutes.
Interviewer:
Why?
Jennifer:
They didn't really explain why, they just said, "that's your new program."
Interviewer:
What was that like for you to be told, "this is your new program. You're going to be strapped down."
Jennifer:
I got so sick to my stomach that I just wanted to throw up. I couldn't eat. I just felt so nauseous and cold. I felt really cold and sweaty and nauseous. And I was so worried about it that I wanted to make it happen to get over with. Like I was so scared of it happening that I like fulfilled that fear to get it over with. So I don't know. It just felt like I worried about it so much that I just wondered what would happen when it happened. Like when you're so scared of something, you almost make it happen just to get it over with. So you won't feel so scared for a while. That's how it felt.
Interviewer:
You know the center says that this treatment, this shock therapy, is better than putting kids on a lot of drugs. What do you think?
Jennifer:
I've been one of those people that was like all drugged up on so many medicines. And I will take that any day over being shocked. Because I wasn't afraid. I was tired. I wasn't afraid. I wasn't afraid of staff. I wasn't afraid of people. I was just tired. I'll take that any day over what happened.
Interviewer:
What do you think shock therapy is? What would you call it?
Jennifer:
I would call it beating someone up. It's just mean. It's hurting. It's abuse. It's abuse of power.
Interviewer:
Some people call it torture. What do you think?
Jennifer:
It's torture.
[Audio interlude #3 ends and it returns to Dustin Gibson and Devyn Springer]
Dustin:
But that's a part of the way in which it's been marketed. When women are taken from their homes and they're deemed to have gone crazy, lot of the times, not due to disability but due to a trauma, intimate violence, or gender violence, they were disappeared to institutions under the guise of this being like a safe place for them. Or kids were taken. So there's all of these ways in which we think about it, because of what the state has done to our people, that create barriers in thinking and talking about it. So that source is important to name, because it is drastically different for people that aren't Black. And I think we can even look at the influence of ableism on the way people perceive and respond to the TLGBQ community. And I'm thinking a lot about "gay conversion camps" and conversion therapy and how this idea that queerness or transness or any sort of variation among the spectrum is an illness or deviancy that must be treated. And it's treated in a carceral way. You're sent to a camp that you can't escape and you're essentially tortured and you endure violence. Mental, physical, psychological, cultural violence. And you can't get to that without a society structured on ableism and without ableism being entangled in some way with these notions of colonial gender and sexuality. And I think there's a lot that's mixed up in there, but you really can't get to the point where we have these gay conversion camps, which have massive negative consequences on thousands of people every year, without there being this horribly ableist, racist, cis heteronormative patriarchal basis for that.
Dustin:
That's a perfect example. Like queerness was seen as a mental illness until the 60s. It's a part of the DSM. So "normal" is bullshit. And there's no such thing as normal. Because anything that could be viewed as deviant could be categorized and justified through disability or as the response to deviance could be justified by labeling it as such.
Devyn:
So you mentioned earlier that there's always carceral responses to disabled Black people. And I know we've been talking for about an hour now, so I'm not going to hold you for too much longer, but I do want to get into this notion of the carceral. (And when I say prison, I mean the entire prison industrial complex. I mean everything from prisons, jails, detention centers, as well as state sanctioned asylum police officers, resource officers in schools. So when I say prisons I want to make sure listeners know I'm framing it as the entire prison complex, including the violent police arms of the prison.) I want to know about this carceral response to disabled Black people and colonized people. Especially because I think that people don't really grasp the extent to which the response to disability, to Black people by the state is so carceral-based. So I was wondering if you could break down a little bit by what you meant by that and your general thoughts.
Dustin:
So at a base level, disability is something that is oftentimes criminalized, but disability is also oftentimes constructed in order to criminalize people. So thinking back to drapetomania and rascality. Natasha McKenna, according to the police records of her death, has "excited delirium." Excited delirium is something that is just constructed to speak to whatever list of behaviors. It's this thing that feels like it comes out of thin blue air. And the response to that is carceral. In Natasha McKenna's sense it's police murder, prison murder. But excited delirium is now also a part of school police codes and policies, meaning that if children are exhibiting this behavior, then the response could be whatever force necessary to subdue that threat. Meaning they could be killed because they're exhibiting these behaviors. Now what those behaviors are, could be a range of anything. So that's one of the ways in which disability is created to get us into these places. I'd say we have ableist laws, such as "resisting arrest" and "disorderly conduct." Disorderly conduct this thing where no one can define it. The law itself can't define what disorderly conduct is, but oftentimes it'll capture disabled people. Bodies and minds are literally "disorderly," as given to us by society standards. So we have disabled people populating the majority of jails and prisons. The numbers that are cited are often very low. It's not incorporating the reality - which is that people are developing disabilities inside of carceral spaces at much higher rates than people do on the outside, because of some of the things that were mentioned - next to coal waste dumping sites, toxic land, etc. We who have been in prison know water is not something that is clean. And with prisons, the literal design of itself, like right now during the pandemic, we're talking about it as a place that social distancing can't happen. But even when there's not a pandemic, a place that's designed where distancing can't happen is something that is not natural to our bodies minds, and it perpetuates and exacerbates disability. So there are all these ways all in which we enter it because of disability, whether that is somebody who is in a manic episode, whether that is somebody like Jeremy McDole that is raising up in his wheelchair to release tension on his back, which wheelchair users often do, being seen as a threat, whether it's somebody that is experiencing some type of trauma or violence and responds to it in a physical way. Like we see a lot of women being punished for surviving. So those are just some of the ways in which we have a carceral response to it. Another one is the carceral ideologies. It's important to name psych wards and other state institutions as places that have the same ideologies. Where separation segregation is happening, where it's a binary system, where people that are gendered as men and women can't interact. And that's also a form of eugenics, right? The same way that prisons are a form of eugenics, these institutions have been that. Historically they they've oftentimes sterilized people. That doesn't happen as much as it did, but it does still happen.
Devyn:
You know, because you know me, but I'm always very big on telling people to speak with incarcerated people. You can do the theory, you can read the books, you can retweet, you can go to the panel, you can even go to the protest, but you have to be in direct conversation with incarcerated people and their families, friends and loved ones. And that can look like many different things. That can be direct organizing and actually going into the prison or jail and speaking with them. Or that can be letter writing and pen pals. But one of the reasons I say that is because you learn the longterm effects that the prison site has on people. And it makes me think so much about solitary confinement. Right now in the U.S., there are more people in solitary confinement than the in entire prison population of most countries around the world, which is something to really grasp your mind around. There's also more people serving life in prison in the U.S., than the entire prison population of Japan, for example. A very close comrade of mine who was formerly incarcerated has real longterm mental effects, I should say body mind effects, from his time spent in solitary confinement in a Georgia prison. He was in a halfway house upon being released and he had panic attacks and a number of different manifestations of that torture, to the point where the response from the people who ran the halfway house, which was ran through the city, was actually to send back to jail, and to further criminalize this person. Right? And so this idea of the carceral ableism and this carceral response to Black people makes me think of the prison as a site of ableist violence, not just where people with disabilities end up. The same way Angela Davis talks about the prison as a site of gendered violence, right? Like if you want to end gender violence, you don't use this tool and weapon of gendered violence to end it. I think a lot about the ableist violence that is the prison site and the carceral responses in such a myriad of ways.
Dustin:
There's a piece by somebody I was in a community with, Celine Holbrook (???). He wrote it while he was in Pennsylvania prisons. Celine got out a couple of years ago, he was one of the juvenile lifers, and he quoted Mutulu Shakur in a piece called "high tech brutality control units." He wrote it while he was in solitary and talked about solitary being something designed to deprive the senses. So that's like that site of ableism that you're talking about, sensory deprivation. That's what prisons are designed to do. Whether it's depriving people of light, of food, of water, of touch. Think about the folks that are doing life in Pennsylvania. Many of them that have been there for 30 or 40 years haven't had any type of physical touch, outside of cops touching them and strip searches. Think about what that type of deprivation does to people. There's people like Jeremy Woody, who's a formerly incarcerated deaf person that has written about it and talked about it, through the work of TL Lewis, with HEARD ("Helping, Educate and Advancing the Rights of the Deaf"). They work on deaf wrongful conviction cases and support folks while they're on the inside and out. But talk a lot about what solitary confinement is for deaf people. It's a site of deprivation, where not only are you losing language, but there's no visible visual stimulation. For folks that aren't deaf/blind. And the only auditory processing that you get is like loud sounds and doors slamming. That literally drives people crazy. To come out of situations like that with sanity is miracles. It's designed to make people crazy. So that in itself is the ableist structure that we're talking about. And then there's all of the other things around food quality, around isolation. All of this stuff that happens in prisons that we know of that are ableist.
Devyn:
And I'm so glad you brought up TL because I'm such a big fan. I want to have them on the podcast. TL is one most hardworking individuals that I know, for sure. Their work around being deaf in prison and their advocacy work and legal work around that is truly phenomenal and inspirational. Your work with incarcerated youth as well. I know we're getting ready to sign off, but I wanted to give you a chance to speak about the work you do with the youth.
Dustin:
Like you said, I think it's important to talk to people that are incarcerated if we're out in the world doing work around incarceration. For me, it feels like that just came naturally. I sat down to write this workshop one day and listed off the amount of people that I grew up with that went to jail. And it was literally every one of my cousins, my friends, outside of myself. And I'm just like, man, this is like so much a part of our experience. That allowed me to have this foundation of knowing, prior to developing language that I felt was very important. It's important for us as people that practice abolition to like actually do shit.To do things and not just talk about it. It's very easy to get caught up in just talking to each other about things. Because when I'm thinking about abolition I want abolition for myself, but I also want it for the people that I grew up with, who would probably never pick up a book by Marx, or know who Eugene Debs is, or think of Mumia as somebody past something they heard a hip hop song. So it's important to connect what's happening outside to what's happening inside. And one of the avenues to do that is through working with young people. I go into classrooms, I support various youth groups or initiative and efforts. And all of our work is around understanding what our position in the system is. So for disabled kids, it's like, hey, this is what disability is. This is how society is constructed around disability. And we work through that in a lot of different ways. We have book clubs, study groups, full semester-long classes, etc. But for the incarcerated kids, I go into kid jails. And I only have a three hour window, and chances are I probably won't see them again. Like if I come back next week, they might be out, or they might be gone to a kid prison. So that three hours is really just whatever we can make it in that space. Like there's no, there's no ability to create a safe space. It's not a safe space. We're supervised by cops, for the most part. I don't know how much I want to say here, but we just do systems analysis. And then when we come out, if this is something that they want to continue, then we have supports on the outside to connect them to those organizing apparatuses. And that's only if they want to do that. So it feels like part and parcel of my job is to like sell them this idea that they could also be a part of undoing the systems that are impacting them in their people. And another part of it is just like making space for them. Because up until that point and while they're in the jail, there's so many people telling that the reason they're there is them. So that's why there's a desire for me to talk about it in a systematic way. So if anything, they're understanding, at least a little bit, that they didn't control everything up until that point. That there's responsibility there, but a lot of it is larger than them.
Devyn:
Well Dustin, I could keep speaking with you for hours, but I think we've covered so much ground in a short amount of time. It was like a guerilla conversation. We touched on a lot of different threads. I really appreciate your time. Can you let listeners know where they can find you and also how they can support the work you're doing?
Dustin:
You can find me online on social media. My handle is @notthreefifths and my website is just my name, DustinPGibson.com. I have resources on there, like some writings. But really a list of the people that I learned from is what I would really direct folks to. And another area of support could be the Free Josh Williams Campaign. We have a website up, it's called FreeJoshWilliams.com. We've been loosely posting information there about updates from Josh, like things that he's written himself, organizing some letter writing events for him to support his parole, which has been pushed back to September. You know, Devin and I talked about this, but he's the only remaining political prisoner from the Ferguson uprisings. He was 19 when he went in, he just turned 24 last November. And he is always looking for people to send comic books, images from Ferguson, images from what's happening right now and just connect with him. He also has friends in there that he wants folks to connect with, which is all on his website too.
Devyn:
And you're actually in conversation with Josh and you're definitely one of the, one of the people making sure that Josh is not forgotten and left behind, like so many people are in this carceral system. So I really appreciate you for that. And I want all the listeners who've made it this far to do a few different things. One, I want you to go to Dustin's website and engage with something on there. Something that Dustin wrote, or one of the campaigns that is on there or the Free Josh Campaign. But I want you to engage with at least one thing on there. The second thing I want you to do is to take out your pocketbooks - ooh, I sound so from the South - take out your wallets, your debit cards, whatever you have Venmo, CashApp and I want you to donate to either a campaign that is promoted on Dustin's website or to a local bail fund. And three, and this is important, I want you to learn about the local prison jail and or detention center where you live. I want you to learn about it. Learn about what the budget is, learn about the demographics, learn about what initiatives probably already exist to take down that prison, jail or detention center. And I want you to know on a local level and make the connections to what we discussed in this episode to that. So this episode has a moral impetus because I want this to be actionable. So let me get off, go ahead.
Dustin:
And, I want to say - state institutions and asylums. And if you're in Pennsylvania, it's $400,000 per person in the state institutions, that's what the budget is.
Devyn:
And making the connections between the jails and prisons that aren't called jails and prisons. Because I guarantee you, in almost every major city in the U.S., and probably in the whole Western world, for anyone who's listening to this, there are institutions right down the road from you where people are held against their will for a myriad of different reasons. With that, this has been another episode of the Groundings podcast. Thank you for your time, Dustin.